School of Swords and Serpents Boxset: Books 1 - 3 (Hollow Core, Eclipse Core, Chaos Core)

by Gage Lee

  “If you insist.” Clem leaned forward to wrap me in a gentle hug. When she straightened, her eyes were fixed on Hirani. “Don’t let anything happen to him.”

  The elder smiled at Clem’s fierce glare and offered my friend a shallow bow of respect.

  “I would never let harm befall him,” Hirani said. “He is my friend, too.”

  “Thank you, honored Elder.” Clem bowed so low her face nearly touched her knees. “I am grateful for your help.”

  Clem backed out of the room without rising, a surprisingly formal show of respect from my usually outspoken and untraditional friend.

  “Keep her close.” Hirani sighed and flicked her fingers toward the chair she’d left. It zipped across the room, and she sank into its comfortable embrace. “Don’t tell anyone about that. I’m embarrassed enough that the heretics caught me unaware. I’ll never live it down if anyone finds out I can’t stand on my own for more than a few minutes. And that goes double for you two.”

  Niddhogg cleared his throat nervously, and Hahen glanced between my clan elder and me.

  “No one listens to me, anyway,” the rat spirit said with a shrug and tapped my toe with his tail. “Especially this one.”

  “Go easy on the kid,” Niddhogg said. “He did what needed to be done to save his friends. What kind of jerk finds fault with that?”

  “That’s a fair point.” It was Hirani’s turn to look embarrassed. She leaned further back in her chair and stretched her legs out in front of her, feet under my bed. “Jace, we worry about you because you’re important. Not just to the clan. The Inquisition thinks you’re critical in the coming convergence, and I’m inclined to agree with them. It’s been generations since someone with your powers appeared in Empyreal society.”

  “I didn’t just appear,” I grumbled. Eclipse Warriors, including me, had been the result of experiments by masters of jinsei engineering. That hadn’t worked out well for any of us. The original Warriors had been all but wiped out, and I’d had to finish them off.

  Which had, I suspected, a lot to do with why my core was damaged. What had happened in the Far Horizon had changed me in ways I didn’t fully understand. I still had nightmares about the realm of the Locust Court and the otherworldly horrors that I’d witnessed there.

  That memory triggered a cascade of images through my thoughts. The end of the last challenge rushed back to me in vivid detail, and I sat bolt upright in my bed. How could I have forgotten any of that?

  “What does the Grand Design look like?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t look like anything.” Hirani shrugged. “To mortals, anyway. The Flame can see it, I assume. Or it holds a very detailed model in its conceptual space. None of us is really sure what the Flame can or can’t do.”

  “How do the oracles interpret the Design if they can’t see it?” My time with the inquisitors taught me that the Church took the predictions of the oracles very seriously. If they couldn’t even see the Design, I couldn’t believe they were accurate at all.

  “It’s complicated.” Hirani paused at my frown. “Oh, fine. I don’t understand all the details, either. Mortals can’t comprehend the full scope of the Grand Design—not even the oldest of dragons or sages. It’s simply too vast for our minds to contain. The oracles are gifted with glimpses of parts of the pattern, and they interpret what they see using divinatory techniques.”

  “That doesn’t sound very useful.” Pronouncements from the oracles were rare, but they were always disseminated as if they’d come through a hotline directly from the Flame. This was the first I’d ever heard that maybe the information they provided was basically secondhand hearsay. “What if their interpretation is wrong?”

  “Or they just lie,” Niddhogg grumbled.

  “That’s why their accuracy is often in question. Imagine trying to describe an entire painting after only looking at one tiny corner of the canvas. That’s effectively what the oracles do.” Hirani paused and lowered her voice until I had to strain to hear her words. “And your dragon friend is right. There’s no guarantee that the oracles are always truthful or accurate. The temptation to adjust what they see to promote a conclusion favorable to their interests must be difficult to resist.”

  I chewed on the elder’s words. The image of a red-robed giant burning the scrivenings with a brand he’d taken from the silver fire made much more sense after my discussion with Hirani. The Inquisition had tried to pressure me into affecting the convergence. That couldn’t have been what the Empyrean Flame wanted when it laid out the Grand Design thousands of years ago.

  “The Flame should stop them from interfering with its plan,” I said. “There’s no point in creating the Design in the first place if mortals can mess it all up whenever they feel like it.”

  “Free will,” Hahen explained. “The Grand Design is an image of a perfect, harmonious universe. The Flame never intended for it to unfold exactly as it predicted. The plan is there to guide us. We aren’t shackled to its path.”

  That was exactly the kind of annoying nonsense Brother Harlan had told me over and over while I’d been the Inquisition’s guest. Maybe it all made perfect sense if you’d been born into the upper levels of Empyreal society, but as a camper who’d been kicked and stepped on by servants of the Grand Design my whole life, it sounded pointless. It was hard for me to believe that Hahen believed any of it. He’d been a slave to the Reyes family for decades, maybe centuries. He couldn’t possibly think the Flame had guided Tycho’s family to abuse a spirit like that.

  “I saw something,” I said slowly. “After the challenge.”

  I explained the vision, as much of it as I could remember, to Hirani and the spirits. Their faces grew darker and grimmer with every new revelation. When I finished, all three of them stared at me like I’d grown a second head.

  “And the leader of the Shambala team was with you through all this?” Hirani asked in grave tones.

  “She saw it all,” I said.

  “That’s not great,” Niddhogg said quietly. “Who knows how she’ll interpret any of that.”

  “I’m afraid you’re right,” Hirani said quietly. “This definitely relates to the convergence, and if the dragon was there, then she’s tangled up in this, too. Jace, I need to bring this to Sanrin, immediately.”

  And, with that, Hirani opened a portal with a wave of her hand and stepped through it into a street lined with bombed-out buildings that reeked like a garbage dump. Before the portal snapped closed behind the elder, I heard the distinctive crack of gunshots and a long, drawn-out cry of pain. It was hard to believe that the battle against the heretics had escalated to open warfare in the streets. I wished for the thousandth time that I hadn’t broken my veil, so I could help my clan put an end to the threat the rebels posed to Empyreal society.

  Though if I hadn’t broken my veil, I’d never have advanced, and I wouldn’t have stopped the Locust Court or the Lost from invading the world. Things were bad now. I’d prevented them from getting infinitely worse.

  I shook my head. I’d go crazy if I second-guessed myself on every decision I’d made. There would always be trade-offs, no matter what I did.

  “I don’t think Trulissinangoth was any clearer about what we saw than I was,” I told Niddhogg. “We were both pretty freaked out.”

  “Maybe.” Niddhogg flapped over and landed on the bed next to me. “Dragons are sore losers, kid. They live for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years, and they never forget anything that happens to them. You insult a dragon when it’s a whelp, it’ll wait a hundred years to strike you down in revenge. After humanity became the Empyrean Flame’s favorites, the Scaled Council vowed to make everyone regret the decision to put men in charge of protecting the Grand Design. That vision you saw is basically the dragons’ worst fears. Trulissinangoth will run home and tell everyone what she saw. Bet on that.”

  Something about what the dragon said didn’t make sense to me. The vision had clearly shown men, the Locust Court, and some weird tentac
le monster burning up the pattern of the Grand Design. But it had also just as clearly shown dragons doing the same thing. If Trulissinangoth reported her vision to her elders, they’d have to see that dragons weren’t any better than humans.

  “That’s not how the dragons will see it,” Niddhogg said when I explained my reasoning. “You see dragons destroying the Design alongside humans. A dragon will see their people as the heroes of this story. To them, fire can be used as a weapon, but it also makes a heck of a shield. They’re burning the Design, sure, but they aren’t destroying it. They’re making fire breaks to save as much of the pattern as they can.”

  “Listen to the dragon,” Hahen said. “Despite his size, our friend was raised among them and shares their instincts.”

  “Watch your mouth.” Niddhogg exhaled a tongue of flame toward the ceiling. “I understand them, but I’m not one of them. I’ll never forgive them for what they did to me.”

  There were a ton of questions I wanted to ask Niddhogg after that last sentence. The angry gleam in his eye told me that wouldn’t be wise, though. I let it drop and considered what he’d said.

  If Trulissinangoth really thought everyone else was out to destroy the Grand Design, she’d look for any edge to win the Gauntlet. Given her superior size and strength, she might be tough enough to take me down despite the differences in our cores’ power levels.

  Not that I could depend on my core, anyway. That last challenge had shredded its shell down to a fraction of its full power. Pushing it any further could split it right in half.

  I had a lot of work to do, and I’d need even more help to get it done before the final challenge.

  “I have to ask you a favor, Niddhogg,” I said.

  “Fire away, champ.” The dragon puffed out its chest and flapped its stubby wings.

  So far, the challenges had all been one team against the arena. Something told me the last phase of the Gauntlet would pit the teams against one another much more directly. My hands balled into white-knuckled fists at the thought of going up against the Shambala team.

  “Teach me how to kill dragons.”

  The Wheel

  THE MEDICAL STAFF DIDN’T have any trouble keeping my friends out of the infirmary, but Ishigara cut through their nonsense with the ease of a fusion blade slicing through a stick of butter. The scrivenings professor swooped into my hospital room with a string of annoyed nurses, staff members, and one very angry doctor trailing behind her like a war kite’s tail. It was the first day of classes after the holiday break, and I was almost excited by the ruckus after three days of bedridden boredom.

  “You cannot disturb my patients,” the doctor snapped once everyone had filed into my recovery room. So many people had crowded around my bed I was afraid they’d step on a cord and disconnect one of the machines that hummed night and day. I had no idea what most of those contraptions did, but they certainly seemed important to my continued well-being.

  “I can, and I will,” Ishigara snapped right back. “I’ll be visiting every member of the school’s Gauntlet team today to administer their assessments. Including the one still in your care.”

  The nurses looked nervously at the doctor, who in turn looked anxiously between Ishigara and me. He clearly didn’t want anyone to disturb me. Even more clearly, the doctor did not want to interfere with these assessments.

  Or, maybe, he just didn’t want to cross Ishigara. I couldn’t blame the guy. She had a wicked gleam in her eye and a nasty bite to back up her bark.

  “Very well.” The doctor sighed and backed out of the room with the nurses and staff members scurrying after him. “Please be considerate of the patient’s injuries during the testing. He needs his sacred energy to recover.”

  My itching burns and the bruises that still covered my body despite the intrachannel jinsei infusions the medical staff had pumped into me were proof of the doctor’s words. I was glad my friends had recovered, but really wished I could get out of the infirmary, too. Before I could ask how much longer I’d be cooped up there, Ishigara dragged a chair up next to my bed and pushed the tips of her fingers against my chest.

  “Relax, Jace,” she said. “This is one of the easier parts of the assessment.”

  “That’s good.” I let out a frustrated sigh. I’d planned to spend the day thinking of new ways to fix my core. “Let’s get this over with. I’ve got more important things to do.”

  “Is that so?” Ishigara peered at me over the top of her glasses. Had she always had one gray eye and one hazel eye? “You do understand that this assessment will dictate the classes you take next year?”

  Panic seized my throat and made it impossible for me to speak for a few seconds. Surely no one got booted out of the School over these tests. Empyreal society spent good money to train students here. It wouldn’t make any sense to eject students after their third year.

  They couldn’t do that.

  “Could I be expelled if I fail the assessment?” Putting my fear into words made my stomach clench and my throat tighten again.

  “No, no.” Ishigara rolled her eyes at the question. “But you could be assigned to a temple or requisitioned by one of the explorer camps in the Far Horizon.”

  “I want to stay here.” Going anywhere else would be a disaster. The elders of my clan needed me here. I needed to be here to help them find my mother. If I was sent away, all my plans would collapse in an instant.

  “What we want isn’t always what the Grand Design has in store for us, Jace.” The professor reached past my head and snapped her fingers. When she pulled her arm back, an intricate metal device rested in her palm. “This is the Wheel of the Flame.”

  “Wait, how did you do that?” I desperately wanted to know what technique Ishigara had just performed. Being able to summon items from thin air would be enormously useful, and this might be my only opportunity to squeeze an explanation out of the professor.

  “That’s not a technique.” Ishigara made a small tsking noise. “You haven’t been paying attention in class. That was a complex spatial graft. Something you should be able to master before the end of the year. Assuming, of course—”

  “That I survive.” There was no point in beating around the bush. The second challenge had torn my team up, and we hadn’t even been up against our competitors. If the dragons had been in the mix, there was no guarantee any of us would have walked, or been carried, out of there.

  “Yes.” Ishigara ran her finger around the edge of the circular mechanism, and it unfolded like an origami fan. Metallic slats jutted from its sides, then rotated until their long edges were flush against one another. Ishigara tilted the device toward me so I could see what she’d created.

  It looked like a roulette wheel, though there were only seven wedges, and they were all either shiny bare metal or flat black. Each edge bore a single word down its length: Citizen, Counselor, Scholar, Guardian, Seer, Militant, Noble. A glowing sphere pulsed at the heart of the wheel.

  “I’m supposed to spin the wheel to see what my role in Empyreal society will be?” I couldn’t believe the Flame would be so capricious. It did make a certain amount of sense, though. If the Grand Design could be trusted, then even chance could play into it. For a true believer, a toss of the dice was simply another expression of the Empyrean Flame’s will.

  I, however, was not a true believer.

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” Ishigara tapped the wheel’s side and a pair of small handles popped out from just beneath the wheel’s surface. “This isn’t a game of chance. It’s a device to measure the distinct qualities of your jinsei.”

  “That can’t be true.” Everything I’d been taught by Hahen and my other instructors at the academy said that all sacred energy was the same sacred energy. It was an indivisible force that could be temporarily contained within an individual or object. It wasn’t specific or unique to any one person or creature, though. “You mean it measures my aspects?”

  That, at least, would make sense. Every person absorbed and
held aspects in their aura in different ways. Other practitioners, those without hollow or Eclipse cores, even had unique aspects that went into binding their fusion blade or otherwise identifying them.

  “No.” Ishigara gestured for me to hold on to the wheel’s handle. “The jinsei that passes through you is connected to the Grand Design. When you hold the wheel, that same jinsei will help identify your location within the Flame’s plan and foresee probable futures that contain your distinct imprint.”

  “And no one can refuse the test, I suppose.” The wheel seemed sinister to me, now. The idea that a device would determine how to assign me to some slot in the Empyreal hierarchy didn’t sit well with me. If I’d been given this test before I healed my core, there’s no telling what sort of nonsense it would have come up with. People changed over time. Measuring their value so young was a waste of time and a dangerous way to pigeonhole people.

  I did not want to take this assessment.

  “Jace, don’t be difficult.” A strong taste of Ishigara’s hostile tone crept back into her words, along with a razor-sharp glint in her eye. “Every student at every school takes this test during their third year. It is more than tradition, it is law. You will take this test.”

  “Can we at least discuss my results when this is over?” I wanted a chance to argue my case if the contraption decided something absurd.

  “Of course.” Ishigara’s tone was still frosty. “Now, take the handles, and cycle your breathing as you normally would.”

  “The delamination.” That could be my escape from this stupid test. “If I cycle, it could get worse.”

  “I’ve spoken with the medical staff. Brief cycling, all that is required for this test, will not cause you any harm.” Ishigara pushed the device into my hands. “Take the handles and begin.”

  With a sigh, I took the wheel from Ishigara. Its handles were so cold they stuck to my palms and sent shivers racing up my arms. The ball at the center of the wheel throbbed in time with my pulse.